


they write happy endings, don't they?

by fanfoolishness (LoonyLupin), LoonyLupin



Series: Character Studies (Dragon Age) [7]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Dragon Age Quest: In Hushed Whispers, Gen, Red Lyrium, Red Lyrium Idol, Redcliffe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 15:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14168238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/fanfoolishness, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/LoonyLupin
Summary: Varric Tethras is captured by Tevinter forces and held in Redcliffe Castle after the Herald of Andraste mysteriously vanishes.  Escape isn't coming as easily to him as he might have hoped.  But things have a way of working themselves out, don't they?Don't they?





	they write happy endings, don't they?

Varric had always been damn good at denial. **  
**

It had served him well over the years, hadn’t it?  It helped when he spent half his twenties taking care of his mother and she died anyway.  It’d been there for him and Bianca when they sent their futile letters back and forth, when they kept their secrets and lost the reason for keeping them.   Denial had kept him from dealing with Bartrand for as long as possible.  Denial had helped him ignore the Qunari, the mages, the templars until the city came crashing down around his ears.

Denial.  It worked.  So what made this any different?  This musty, shitty cell underneath Redcliffe Castle was a piece of cake, even if they’d stripped him of Bianca, his backup daggers, his lockpicking kit, his emergency fountain pen and journal.  He’d been in worse scrapes.  

All he had to do was find something, anything, that would let him pick the lock, and he’d be on his way.  Even if the Herald had vanished and all hope seemed lost, well, maybe it would work itself out.  Some of his stories had happy endings, after all.

* * *

It wasn’t working out so well.

He managed to pick the lock the first night with a bit of metal sheared off his boot.  They caught him one floor up and kicked him in the ribs until he coughed up blood.

He picked the lock the second night with the pin of his belt buckle, even though it was hard to breathe; every expansion of his chest seared.  They caught him on the stairs.  His nose streamed from a hit to the face.

He picked the lock the third night with a button he’d ripped off his jacket and sharpened against the edge of one of the bars.  They caught him in the hall, his breathing too noisy.   His ears rang where they boxed him in the head.

After that they cut out his buttons and buckles from his clothes, traded out the locks, and kept a guard on him constantly.  His head swam and his hands itched, aching to do more.  

He’d been too eager, too rushed to get out of this place.  Was it his imagination, or were the walls closing in?  He’d never liked tight spaces.  He’d have been a terrible Orzammar dwarf.

* * *

He was so fucking bored.

He wondered idly where they’d put Blackwall.  He wondered how the Herald and the Tevinter mage had disappeared in a flash.  He wondered who the guards were, what Alexius was up to, why they’d chosen Redcliffe and not someplace warmer.  Everything was cold and damp and moldering.  And even though the Tevinters had no interest in Mabari, the place still smelled, overwhelmingly, of dog.

He tried chatting up the guards; pulled out all the stops.  Friendly banter.  Insults.  Meandering stories.  Nothing got a response.  Sometimes he asked for a pen and paper.  “Ever heard of me?” he asked more than once, with a winning grin and a cock of his head.  “ _Hard in Hightown_?  C’mon.  I know for a fact Maevaris Tilani called it ‘trash, but enjoyable trash.’  You can’t get better than that in Tevinter.”  They just looked at him with flat eyes in blank faces.  Whatever.  They were probably all weird on blood magic.

He tried listening instead.  Sometimes they did talk amongst themselves.  Usually stupid things, what was for dinner, who was punished for trying to run away, who Alexius had chewed out most recently.  Sometimes there were interesting tidbits about a prisoner upstairs, a woman whose capture had apparently been quite the coup.  Sometimes there were rumors of an Elder One, information that was disquieting enough that he had to stop listening and start pacing.  He knew he should pay attention, so that if – no,  _when_  – he escaped he’d have useful intel, but the information seemed less like a commodity and more like a death sentence here on the inside.  So he paced sometimes and shut his ears and told himself he’d done his part.

* * *

Pacing lost its fun, though, when he discovered something new in the left corner of his cell.  The ground didn’t look right.  He thought at first he was imagining it, even though he could feel it pressing against his eardrums like a mosquito’s whine.  

He tried to ignore it for a few days.  Paced and paced around it, refusing to examine the corner where the ground looked wrong.

Eventually, though, he couldn’t stand it any longer.  He brushed away the dirt on top, revealing red lyrium crystals creeping out of the ground, glittering in the dim torchlight.  His hand froze over the red specks, trembling.

He stared at the red for a moment.  A single frozen moment, his heart a jagged faltering in his chest, his mind a howling blank.  Then the mosquito whine was sheer and sharp in his ears, and he remembered the song in Bartrand’s home, remembered the shimmering hum that Hawke and Merrill and Anders could not hear.

“Fuck,” he muttered.  A ragged breath, and then a shout tore itself from his lungs.  “Fuck this shit!”

* * *

Varric scratched at his chin.  Too much beard.  You’d have to put an arrow in him before he braided the mess that kept trying to grow; he might be losing it, but not enough to go full Orzammar.  His fingernails were jagged against his skin like a pen nib tearing through thin paper.  If only they’d let him shave.

His guards were too busy with other things, though.  Apparently Empress Celene was dead and the world was overrun with demons.  You know, normal shit.

He had his own issues.  He didn’t feel so good, these days.  Kind of dizzy.  Kind of sick.  His bones hummed on the inside, trying to match the song of the red lyrium growing in his cell.  It was growing larger every day and was now several inches tall.  He stayed as far away from it as he could, but it still messed with his head, its song inescapable.

He tried to drown it out.  He didn’t like to sing; he’d told Hawke that more than once.  “I don’t sing, Hawke.”  His voice cracked when he asked it to carry a tune, even more than it did normally.  He’d always had only whiskey and broken glass to work with when it came to that.  But he liked to hum, liked the little dwarven tune he’d repurposed for Bianca’s song, and it thrummed in his throat like a talisman, the words mixing and sliding around in his head but the melody strong in his mouth.

Sometimes he tried talking over the sound, when humming was too hard.  It worked, a little, but it made him feel like a madman.  At first he simply narrated what he was thinking.

“Day two hundred and seventy. I think.  I’m guessing.  My captors have still somehow failed to provide me with a comfy bed, good ale, and paper and pen.  I’m getting pretty pissed off, and so are my publishers and adoring fans.”

But the days were flimsy things, and it was lonely talking to himself, so at times he talked to others.  It wasn’t crazy if you knew they weren’t really there, right?

“So, Bianca.  If things had been different – where do you think we’d be?  I’d like to think of us kicking ass and pissing off the Ancestors.  You’d be the first surfacer Paragon and I’d be your loyal paramour, and it’d be just great, Bianca, you listen to me.”  But thinking of Bianca and what might have been was a surefire way to get him melancholy.  Funny how that worked.  He tried again.

“Bartrand.  I hate the way this shit sings.  Is this a dwarf thing, that we can hear it more than other people?  Because if so, that’s damn unfair.  I don’t know what that idol told you to do, or why it hit you so hard.”  He stared at his hands.  Remembered a bloodied blade.  “How’d we get here, Bartrand?  Brothers are supposed to look out for each other, right?  You tried to kill me, but I did you one better.  Did I do it because I hated you, or because I cared about you, you idiot?  I’m… still not sure which is worse, and which it was.”  No, no, that wasn’t helping, wasn’t helping at  _all_  –

“Hawke.  Shit, it’s good to see you.  Where are you?  You probably noticed I stopped sending letters.  That’s because these bastards won’t give me any paper.  I’d write on my leather coat if I had to, Hawke, you of all people deserve ruining a good piece of tailoring.  You deserved so much more than what Kirkwall gave you; you were too damn good for the place.  I wish I could have –”

But that was too painful to say, so he fell back against the wall of his cell, staring at the baleful red lyrium, and wondering, wondering, what it was doing to him.

* * *

The red was in his throat, his eyes, his hands, belly bones skin tongue teeth.  He was drowning slowly, even with his head above the water.  The song pounded in his ears.  When he tried to hum Bianca’s tune, the red whined in his throat, twining a weird, high weave through his gruff voice.  

His hands hurt.  Fingers stiffened, didn’t want to work.  He wasn’t sure how well he could hold a pen now.  It scared him less than it should have.

* * *

The song of the red lyrium wasn’t such a bad thing, really.  It had a complexity to it, a beauty that Varric almost thought he could read if he turned his head and listened hard.  “All right, Bartrand,” he muttered.  “I’ll grant you that.  It’s pretty, I guess.”  His hands curled and uncurled into fists, pulsing with the rhythm of the red.  It was all around him.  It _was_ him.

He kept listening, and it sounded like a song he knew once upon a time and then forgot.  

It sounded like a story.


End file.
